Drabbles for Two Ducks
by LunaSphere
Summary: Glimpses into the lives of Fakir and Duck at various points of transformation.
1. Drowning

_A/N: Ok, so before This Pendent Heart hijacked the storyline, I had intended to write a fic about Fakir and Duck as ducks. It's a project I've been wanting to pick up again and thought I'd try it as a drabble series (I'm aiming for about 250 words each). It will all be out of chronological order, but I think the storyline is straightforward enough that it shouldn't be too confusing.  
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_I have some ideas lined up, but I'm looking for prompts too, so if you have a word, a thought, an idea, or a character you would like me to write into this, let me know and I will try my best!_

_Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu  
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**I. Drowning**

The flight across gently greening lands has been like a long dream, incongruous and surreal. Endless days of flight. It is as if they are always in search of spring, always flying towards it, first fleeing winter and now returning since winter itself has fled.

When they wing down upon the lake in Goldcrown Town, the transformation undoes itself for the first time since he wrote it. Fakir feels himself return to human, shaking away feathers into fingers; a gasp startles out of him and he forgets that he and Duck are in middle of a lake. He breathes in lungfulls of water and it is Duck, also as suddenly human and naked as he is, who drags him to shore. A part of him knows he should be burning with embarrassment at the sight of her bare, tanned skin but he isn't. Perhaps he has been a duck for too long.

Once he retches up lakewater, his throat raw from coughing, he asks the only thought that is running through his mind as he looks into her worried blue eyes, "What have we been eating all this time?"

Duck's eyes crinkle with laughter and she embraces him in her relief. It is then that all of Fakir's human inhibitions about oblivious pretty girls in states of undress and his proximity to them come rushing back with a vengeance and he doesn't even hear her response over his pounding blood, "It's probably better not to think about it…"


	2. Apprentice Class

_A/N: **Blue **- yay first reviewer! I'm glad you liked the premise ^_^_

_EDIT: Also, a big big thanks to **Nastuko37** for catching my lazy research on ducks and how the swim vs. how they float! Now fixed.  
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_So much for 250 words :( I'll be more strict with myself next time.  
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_Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu  
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**II. Apprentice Class**

Floating was simple enough, but this...

"What do you mean just move my feet?! I _am_ moving them!"

"Don't grumble at me! It's not my fault you can't do it!"

Fakir makes a lousy student and Duck can't figure out how he could have gotten so good at ballet given his attitude about learning from her. Really, he is about as bad a student as he is a teacher she thinks, remembering the time he helped her practice. She'd caught him during an early morning practice soon after the Ghost Knight mess with the drama club and had quietly taken up one corner of the practice room, slowly moving through the basics while he performed elaborate leaps and turns.

At last, as if unable to watch her imprecise forms any longer, "Your back needs to be perfectly straight. No straighter. Shoulders back."

Duck strained, trying to translate his words into muscle movements.

"Do it again. You need to practice more. Until it's natural and you don't need to think about it."

"Slave-driver," Duck had muttered under her breath even if she had been grateful for his help.

Maybe that's it. No matter how much better they are, it's hard to take instruction from a friend. Maybe under all the grouchy complaining, Fakir is grateful for her help.

She tries again, for the first time, thinking through a process that is as natural and thoughtless as walking to her. "Here, just push your foot back and forth quickly. Every time you push back...it's like the webbing spreads out and then when you bring it forward, bring your toes together so the webbing folds up again."

A look of concentration on his face, Fakir tries to follow her directions, frustration evident in his eyes with each passing second as he simply bobs about unevenly without moving forward in the straight line he had intended.

"Stop thinking about it so much," Duck suggests.

"Well, no wonder it's easy for you!" he snaps back ruffling his feathers.

Or maybe not. "Then figure it out on your own!"

All the same, she swims nearby, one eye on him as he practices furiously near the shallow lake edge even as she forages. He seems more at ease now, without her scrutinizing his failures. When he joins her further in the lake, she understands how he's gotten so good at ballet even with his attitude.

The first time Fakir fails to account for the gentle flow of the lake water and the movements of other waterfowl and suddenly finds himself caught in a row of cygnets, Duck laughs and laughs.


	3. Hands

_Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu  
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**III****. Hands**

He wonders if she misses having fingers. His own close around the inkstand, unstopping it and dipping the quill with the ease of long practice, not a single wasted drop of ink, and he looks at his hand as if belongs to someone else. If having had fingers once, she learns absence, loss. Lessons that cannot be unlearned, he knows.

For the love of a prince she left behind the only life she had ever known, became a human girl, and made her clumsy way through a strange world she in time grew to love as much as well. But no matter how much she loved the prince, it was only because of the promise he made her that she could bring herself to relinquish that world, her prince, and even herself.

_I promise to stay by your side forever_. The words weigh on his heart. Was the promise already broken before he could keep it? Is this love? He does not know.

He snorts inelegantly, and brutally honest even when it means cutting himself against his own bitter cynicism, he admits he is worrying more about himself than about Duck. Would he miss having fingers, he wonders, having known nothing else.

_Stories can only be written as you wish, honestly._ Drosselmeyer's words haunt him now that he has learned the truth of them. For all he despises the man, vows never to be his descendant in anything beyond blood, the words are true. But what does he wish? He does not know. He does not know anything anymore.

The page rests before him, blank, unmarred, a question.


	4. Gossip

A/N: This drabble is for **Blue**, who mentioned in a review, that she wondered "what the other ducks say behind his back." I hope you enjoy it!

The swan couple in the opening are shameless imitation of the ones in E.B. White's _The Trumpet of the Swan_ [cob = male swan, pen = female swan]

_Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu  
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**IV. Gossip **

"Whatever is the matter, my dear?" the swan asks his mate that evening after they put their chicks to bed.

"Didn't you notice that rude little drake cutting in while I was leading the hatchlings in the lake?" she replies her voice and her ruffling feathers showing her irritation.

"Oh, that fellow trying to court that strange little duck? The solitary one?"

"They're both strange if you ask me—before he appeared she would spend her days moping about the lake by herself and consorting with that human who used to come by all that time!"

"Good riddance to him," the cob agrees trying to placate the still cross pen. "I didn't much like the look of him. I always thought that boy was after our eggs."

"Never mind that," she snaps. "It's that drake I'm angry about—the nerve of him, interrupting my lesson!"

"A right mess he made of his footwork, trying to impress his lady friend" the swan chuckles. "Ah, young love," he sighs wistfully.

---

"Do you know who the new drake is?"

"That clumsy one?" a mallard drake swimming nearby interrupts. The females give him a collective, icy stare; his iridescent green head sinks a bit under the weight of their displeasure.

"Dark and mysterious," one corrects.

"I think he's taken," the duck beside her mourns.

"Tortured and dreamy," another adds.

"Perhaps he's a human prince under a spell," a third suggests. They all turn to stare at her before laughing quackingly.


	5. Stupid Questions

_Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu  
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**V. Stupid Questions  
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Spring passes him by. Before summer can pass him by as well, Fakir answers the question, afraid that with autumn, Duck will fly out of his life entirely.

Duck swims, as she does every day, enjoying the feel of the balmy summer air on her body even as her feet pedal in the cool lake water. She glances over occasionally at Fakir seated on the pier as is her habit, because somewhere in her heart she can't believe he is actually there, and yet he always is. She keeps thinking back to what she told an old abandoned lamp once: "It's sad that you're no longer needed, but it's also something that can't be helped."

The prince stopped needing her long ago. Fakir has never needed her, Duck knows, and so hopes that means he will never stop needing her. But all the same, she can't help glancing over at the boy perched with a fishing rod beside him and a notebook on his knee.

Distressed quacking snaps Duck out of her thoughts. Fakir has somehow vanished, without a word to her. She shakes her head as if to dislodge the sudden, inexplicable ache this thought causes and instead considers the bundle of clothing Fakir left behind. In fact, both the rod and the notebook are also still there. Perhaps he merely stepped away, but why without telling her? That's not like him at all.

Duck frowns in puzzlement when she notices the bundle is moving furiously. Her puzzlement only deepens when she catches sight of an irate drake struggling to free his wings from a blue cloth wrapped around him. Something about that expression on that face—the heavy slanting brows, the piercing green eyes, the disapproving mouth—is at once so familiar and yet so foreign. "Do I...know you?"

"What kind of stupid question is that?" he asks irritably as a furious tug on the cloth only serves to make him stumble forward. "Of course you know me!"

And even as everything suddenly falls into place—how could she have failed to recognize that scowl immediately?—all Duck can do is gape. She does not even know what question to start with. No doubt he will find them all stupid.


	6. First Time

A/N: Ok, so I _know_ it's a lame and overused trope, but I just couldn't resist.

_Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu  
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**VI. First Time**

"I am not putting that in my mouth."

"Ok then, start with this."

"It's dirty!"

"You need to stop thinking like that! When you're a duck, you're a duck. When you're human, you're human."

"How does that even make sense?"

"Just eat it!" Duck insists, grabbing the bit of waterplant in her beak and closing in on Fakir with a determined gleam in her eye.

Fakir, steps into the shallow lakewater and considers the slick green leaves—he doesn't even know what they _are_—dangling from Duck's beak with a sinking heart. He had never considered _this_ when he had decided to leave behind his own life, his own world. How Autor would laugh if he knew of this choice between snails and a slimy bit of greenery facing Fakir. Hell, the bastard probably already somehow knows and is sitting snug in his house before a feast of actually _edible_ food and smirking.

"I...I just can't do it, Duck. Don't ask this of me."

Duck swallows the leaves. "Fakir, what exactly do you plan on doing? You're going to starve to death if you keep this up," she frets before dipping once more into the water and tugging out another strand, leaves trailing from her bill into the water. "Close your eyes," she says around the mouthful.

He stares at her a long moment before finally closing his eyes and silently running through all the reasons why writing himself into a duck had seemed such a good idea scant hours ago. He feels Duck's approach in the gentle lapping of the lakewater around his legs, and then feels the press of her beak against his and he is completely undone by the intimacy of the gesture. He does not ever know if he will recover from the shock of it, and in his disbelief swallows unthinkingly.

"See, that wasn't so bad was it? It's moist and a little bit tangy..."

He does not admit he didn't taste a thing.


	7. Art

_Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu  
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**VII****. Art**

Fakir has never much considered the rain before. Ballet and writing after all are pursuits in which danseur and writer constructs his own world and bewitches his audience into following him into it. The real world and such mundane concerns as weather hardly matter and he has never paid much attention to them beyond remembering to bring an umbrella if it looked like rain when walking from the dorm to the practice rooms. Soggy clothes and headcolds are irritants he can do without.

And yet, here on the lake, the rain creates its own world. Water is their element, like the stage to a dancer or paper to a writer. And when it rains, the air itself seems to blur, become rich and liquid and part of the medium out of which they create beauty, art.

The summer shower sets the still lakewater into perpetual motion, each drop rippling like the sweet tinkling of piano keys. Duck swims around a waterlily that seems to be made for the beauty of this moment and nothing else. The lake is covered in the flowers, a watery field of round leaves and glistening white petals facing the sky, rainwater cupped in the heart of the blossoms. The rain somehow makes all the colors more intense, the yellow of Duck's feathers almost golden, the white of the waterlilies impossibly pure.

She turns towards him, her eyes as clear, as artless as the water itself. Without even thinking, he follows her and the two of them swim in a dance as complex as any he has ever learned, tarnished silver and burnished gold gliding among waterlilies, meeting and parting and meeting again.


	8. Literary Criticism

A/N: 7/10 I somehow messed up and posted over this chapter with ch. 9 temporarily. Thanks to Jennifer for letting me know. Sorry for the confusion.

_Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu_

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**VIII. Literary Criticism**

Autor looks up, a frown on his face because of the shadow that has suddenly been cast over the page he has been perusing.

"What happened? How did the ending change?" Fakir demands, looming over Autor's table.

A very familiar redhead peaks around Fakir's back, elbowing him as she does so, "Fakir, don't be so rude!" Autor is not certain, but he thinks she mutters under her breath, "Can't take you anywhere."

Autor carefully marks his page and closes the book, and disregarding both of the newcomers' words, comments, "I've been expecting you, but I didn't think it would take this long."

"Just tell me what the hell is going on!" Fakir growls, as always needled by Autor's all-knowing smugness and his particularly caustic way of rubbing it in.

Autor is not amused. He adjusts his spectacles and remarks in an offhand tone, "Now, who is the one barging into whom after initially refusing to take any advice and is now rudely demanding answers after his own plan failed, hmm?"

"Fakir, you're being a jerk," the redhead confirms.

Fakir grits his teeth and finally takes a deep breath, refusing to acknowledge Duck's words even as he admits—to himself—the truth of them. "Fine. You were right, I was wrong. The story I wrote was somehow imperfect. Now explain."

Thoroughly irritated as he is by this insincere acknowledgment of his genius, Autor cannot resist explaining now that his interpretation of the text has proven itself. He always did think authorial intentionality to be the worst sort of fallacy and it is no surprise Fakir has fallen for it. "You ended with 'And so, together they lived, sharing their lives, side by side.' What exactly did you expect?"

"Now," Autor cannot help concluding with a smirk as he shoos them away, "Go, share your lives and stop blocking my light."


	9. Jete

_Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu_

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**IX. Jete**

Ever since the leaves began flaming on the trees, Fakir has felt knots of dread tying up his stomach. When the first few begin to flutter off branches and land like burning stars on the autumn-blue lake surface and the other waterfowl begin chattering about preparations and the warm southern lands and the long journey, he knows he cannot ignore the inevitable any longer.

Swimming had been difficult enough to master...if humans were meant to fly, he grumbles to himself, they would be born with wings. And then he realizes that he does in fact possess said appendages. Even after all these weeks, he thinks of himself as boy first and duck only after a moment of recollection. He wonders if this will ever change; he wonders if Duck too had felt such a disorientation the entire time she had been a girl.

He does not want to admit that he fears falling. What kind of dancer would he be, afraid of heights and their attendant dangers? And so, clamping down on fear, a grim look in his eyes, he asks Duck one crisp autumn morning, "When do you want to leave?"

"Leave? Leave where? To the other side of the lake?"

Fakir rolls his eyes and begins to question Duck's competence as a duck. "Migration," he responds in a clipped voice and at her still confused look, elaborates, "you know, f-flying south for the winter."

"Oh! This is my first time too!"

And then the true horror of the situation dawns on him. "You mean you don't know how to fly _either_." They are doomed. They will die terrible, grisly deaths, falling from incalculable heights and no one will find their twisted broken bodies—

"Of course I know how to fly!" she huffs, her voice dispelling the gruesome images his lurid imagination is setting before his eyes. But she admits, "I've never flown that distance though. But we'll figure it out as we go! I think it'll be fun!"

And he knows they are really and truly doomed.

His first attempt, in the middle of the night so he will not have the lovesick audience of ducks that trail him when they think he is not watching, is a failure. So is the next and the next and the next. He begins to wonder if he has written himself into a flightless bird and wouldn't _that_ be the perfect irony?

Because of all his failed nighttime practicing, he becomes lethargic in the daytime and Duck begins to fret over him. One night, his rustling as he leaves the reed-nest they sleep in wakes her and she trails after him, filled with curiosity.

She sees him hop onto a fallen tree beside the lake, spread open his wings, and then, fall spectacularly into the water.

"You're doing it wrong."

His head snaps in her direction. "You think?" he asks sourly but bows, rather gracelessly, to her greater experience.

There are more failed attempts, but then one night, as Duck fights sleepiness and the full moon trails clouds, the stars twinkle in the sky at their reflections in the lake water, he realizes that somehow sky and water, they are all the same, and lets go of the fear of the impossible and the unknown that his landbound mind has held so dearly as it were the last vestige of who he once was.

And it is like the first time he performed a _grande_ _jete_, flawless and exhilarating.

No, it is a leap that never ends. It is every dancer's dream. It is overcoming gravity, reality and he thinks—for he would never admit as much aloud—_this is yet another gift she has given me_.


	10. Ladies' Undergarments

A/N: Now for some silliness.

**Blue:** You caught it! They do indeed share a nest. I have a drabble all planned about The Nest-Building Fiasco

_Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu_

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**X. Ladies' Undergarments**

It had seemed a good idea at the time for Fakir to steal into town in the predawn darkness and dig up his own clothes from Charon's house, returning with some for her. But now that Duck is hiding naked and embarrassed, enduring minutes that feel like hours for Fakir to find her and having horrific visions of streaking through Goldcrown if he doesn't, it does not seem like such a good idea after all.

He appears at last, calling out her name, his eyes closed and Duck wonders if he has blundered his way through the undergrowth blind the last few feet. Really, sometimes Fakir can be so ridiculous. As she changes behind a tree, unable to fathom how he was able to find her a sundress among _his_ clothes, Fakir confesses that Charon discovered him and expects him to return so they can talk.

"What about me? Where should I wait for you?" Duck asks uncertainly. She never expected to be a girl again, and now that she finds herself in possession of fingers and toes once more, does not quite know what to do with herself. She wonders if Pique and Lillie remember her. She wonders if her body remembers ballet.

"You're coming too. Charon wants to meet you."

She stares at him open-mouthed wondering what exactly he and Charon had spoken about, but Fakir refuses to say anymore and she has to hurry to catch up with him as he stalks away, heading for the town.

As they walk through town, Duck keeps looking down nervously at the faded green cotton-dress she is wearing and walks so self-consciously that Fakir at last asks her what is wrong.

"I'm not wearing any underwear!" she hisses, her face red. "I feel like everyone must be able to tell!"

"Moron!" If Duck is blushing, Fakir is absolutely incandescent. "Don't tell me that!"

"Well _you_ already know! This is all your fault! Why didn't you didn't bring me any?!"

"You think I'd go through Raetsal's old u-u-underclothes?!" he demands absolutely mortified and queasy at the very thought.

"For my sake, I wish you had!"

There is no response that Fakir can make to that, and he wonders just when he began losing so regularly to Duck in their verbal sparring.


	11. Homesick

_Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu_

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**XI. Homesick**

The lake has many faces and many moods and Duck knows that even if she lives her entire life beside it, she will never know them all but this is part of what she loves about it. And so, she can't help missing the lake even if she does enjoy being human again. She misses even more those quiet lazy summer days of endless blue when she and Fakir had drifted and chatted and had simply _existed_.

Now she is back in the Academy, has been there for weeks and while Fakir is there too, he always seems so busy, rushing towards graduation and working in the evenings, grasping for independence as quickly as possible. She aches for those carefree days of togetherness and somehow her footsteps lead her to the lakeside, as if by simply being in that place she can feel closer to him.

As the sun sets, lost behind trees and dusk overtakes the lake, she feels warm arms slip around her. She tilts her head back for a moment, looking at his face upside down, and smiles. She turns back to the lake and feels Fakir rest his chin on her head and together they watch the summer sun set, the water catching for a moment all the color the sun has cast away.

"I thought you were working tonight?"

"I've missed this too," he says by way of answer and she knows what he means is _I've missed you _and she wonders that he knows to look for her here when she herself had not even known she meant to come.

After the last shard of color has disappeared and they turn away from the lake, Duck is startled by a fading spark of pale green light. Soon they are surrounded by them, fireflies twinkling out of the undergrowth. It is like magic, as if an invisible flame burns in the dark and sends out emerald sparks.

The slow, beautiful duck-days of last summer are gone, but as they walk back to the town, to where home is for now, through the twilight gloom lit by the fading sparks of fireflies drifting skyward, she knows there is enchantment in this moment too.


	12. Fairytale Conventions

A/N: Damn, I'm getting wordy again. It's just that I have so much fun writing Autor I can't make myself _stop_.

_Disclaimer: I do not own Princess Tutu_

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**XII. Fairytale Conventions**

Domesticated ducks, Fakir knows, do not live nearly as long as their wild counterparts and so, instead of moving Duck in with him, he has moved out with her, always by the lake shore regardless of weather, only returning home when he must. It is out here that he begins the story:

_Once upon a time, a fairytale was upended and instead of a princess cursed to be a swan, a duck was given the questionable good fortune of becoming a girl in order to aid the prince she loved. And instead of a knight errant freeing the princess from the curse, a boy who was better at wielding a pen than a sword convinced the duck-girl to relinquish her humanity for the sake of the prince they both wished to save._

_In return, the boy who was not a knight linked his fate to hers, the duck who had once been a princess destined for sorrow because her fate was not linked with prince she loved—_

Fakir sets down his pen. It all seems so trite when put like that but he doesn't know how else to go about it and Autor is absolutely no help. The other boy keeps counseling him to make her human, but how can Fakir do that when he is the one who had convinced Duck to accept her true form and relinquish the humanity that never had been hers in the first place?

Fakir frowns, remembering Autor's incensed rant when he first mentioned the idea a few days ago. "In cases such as these, you turn the princess human, with a kiss, a rose, magic spell! The done thing is for the heroine to turn human! There's no literary precedence for this foolishness!" the bespectacled boy had hissed, voice still low in deference to his librarian's vow of whispers and silence.

But Fakir had sought Autor out for advice on how to proceed not on a lecture on why he _shouldn't_ and when he'd snapped as much at Autor, it had enraged the other boy even further. "I can't believe you even have the power to write when you don't even know this much! Why is it _you_ of all the idiotic people it could be?! Look, there are only a few ways it can go—if she's an animal of some type to begin with like a selkie or a crane then she can only be human while either a.) you don't know what her true form is or b.) you hide her true skin. But as soon as either of these conditions is violated, you lose her.

"If she's a princess under a curse, true love's kiss is the only thing that can bring her back. But there is absolutely no precedence, _none,_" Autor had insisted, almost shouting the last word despite their location, "for the knight to become a duck! You can't just, just _flout_ fairytale conventions like that!"

There was so much wrong with what Autor had said Fakir hadn't know where to start correcting him—she isn't a princess she is a duck, Duck first and foremost. They aren't in love. Maybe he is a little, but she...and it isn't, can't ever be like that. She loves the prince, she has loved and lost someone much more worthy than he could ever hope to be and to even suggest otherwise is ridiculous.

Besides, there is no kiss that can make her what he wants her to be; she already is all he wants. But his thoughts had been all so tangled at that moment, are still all so tangled, and he'd been too furious to try to straighten them that all he could say in response to Autor's rant was "It's her true self, her true form. I can't change that."

"And what about your true form?" Autor had insisted. But Fakir had already stopped listening.


	13. Fathers and Sons

A/N: For **Blue**, who wanted to know what Charon and Fakir talked about. I am not quite happy with it...

Disclaimer: I don't own Princess Tutu

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**XIII. Fathers and Sons**

Fakir returns to find his room untouched, the books just as he left them, yet all of it without a trace of dust as if it is still cleaned regularly by careful hands. His clothes are all laundered and folded, and the entire room feels as if it has been waiting for his return. He is surprised to discover his customary blue shirt a little too tight around his shoulders, and the pants a few inches from his ankles. He starts to dig through the drawers for some smaller clothes for Duck before remembering that there is a trunk of Raetsal's old things in the attic that she never bothered to return for since they are faded and she has long since outgrown them.

The first garment he finds in Raetsal's trunk in his hands, he slips out of the attic and is almost out of the front door when he hears a heavy tread behind him.

Charon calls out Fakir's full name in a tone that Fakir has known to dread since he was a child, the tone Charon used when Fakir was undoubtedly in serious trouble for risking his own life in order to stop Mythos from risking _his_. Fakir turns around, trying his best to hide the dress behind him.

"Why are you stealing out of your own home like a thief?" the man demands and Fakir prays to whatever higher beings that may be that Charon will not notice the dress bundled behind him. "Do you have any idea how much I worried?"

"You don't understand," Fakir says lowering his gaze, unable to look at Charon in the eyes after having disappointed him so, "there wasn't any other way."

Seeing the guilt on Fakir's face, Charon's own stern and harried expression softens slightly. He steps close, resting a hand on Fakir's shoulder. "I was young myself, once Fakir," Charon says with just a touch of that exasperation any older person feels towards a youth who thinks his concerns are ones no one has ever had to face before. "I know what it's like to want to strike out on your own, to make your own fortune and see what life has in store for you and no matter what you do, I'll always be proud of you."

And Fakir can't help but wonder if Charon would feel the same way if he had the slightest idea as to just how Fakir spent the last year. While he is lost in thoughts of feathers and swimming, Charon continues, "But that doesn't mean you can vanish without a word. I was sick with worry, Raetsal too. You have to think about the people who love you."

"I was," Fakir says softly, startled into an admission he has barely made to himself by the gentleness of Charon's voice.

Charon pauses, considering the boy--no, young man--before him shrewdly. His careful gaze catches a glimpse of green fabric trailing behind Fakir and he shakes his head at the antics of youth.

"I expect you to return for breakfast. And bring your young lady with you."

"M-m-my _what_?"

"Really," Charon says throwing up his hands in exasperation, "if you're sneaking clothes out to her, I'd think you'd be more comfortable talking about the situation."

"No, it's not like that! We-we fell in the lake and—you don't believe me, do you?" Fakir grumbles, taking in the amusement in Charon's eyes.

"I'll expect you _both_ in an hour," Charon repeats, a smile on his face, and Fakir's shoulders slump and he mumbles an acknowledgment.

Charon stands in the doorway, watching Fakir hurry down the street until his figure disappears behind a building, and the smile on his face becomes a little worried, a little rueful, but it is a smile nonetheless. He has been a parent long enough to learn that sometimes, being a father is about letting his son stand or fall on his own.


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